Not the usual suspects: Fall fashion trends, with a better backstory

THE PIXIE CUT: Jean Seberg? Bien sûr, but at least make it her earlier roles as Joan of Arc or as teen Cécile in Otto Preminger’s adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse.

Photograph by: Handout
, Columbia Pictures

The September fashion issues may out the big fall trends, fads and fancies but never dare go off-piste.

They can be such a bore with their homogeneous cultural references: obvious, mainstream and repetitive. It’s like designers and editors have been handed the same dog-eared guide book or got together before the season to agree on talking points. Didn’t Hitchcock Heroines and the ladylike New Look just have a star turn a few autumns ago? On the heels of The Girl and the biopic Hitchcock last year, we realize that the director is top of mind again, but that shorthand just seems a little lazy. Especially today with all the possibility of digging deep into the available inspirations — between the vintage television series on Netflix, streaming video on demand and Blu-ray restorations, you’d think there would be more originality.

Yet a man in a three-piece suit is always Cary Grant, and never Gene Wilder in Hanky Panky. We thumb our nose at the lazy conflation of punk and grunge references over at Saint Laurent, where they need to watch a few episodes of My So-Called Life, and maybe Singles. What’s done is done, but at the very least we can suggest more interesting thematic and references for the fall collections.

WE SAY: Jean Seberg? Bien sûr, but at least make it her earlier roles as Joan of Arc or as teen Cécile in Otto Preminger’s adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse. The latter, set on the Côte d’Azur and Paris, is a love triangle with Givenchy and Hermès in the costume design.

KNIT WIT

THEY SAY: Rhoda, Love Story, The Way We Were, with their rough and tweedy textures, cozy cable and Wellesley knits.

WE SAY: The chunky cardigans (and matching pragmatic up-dos) of lesser-known recent foreign films that deserve to be discovered. In the early-1980s-set Barbara, Nina Hoss plots her escape from East Germany while riding her bicycle around the blustery country roads, bundled in a navy cardigan. Playing a chambermaid with a taste for chess in the latter in Queen to Play, Sandrine Bonnaire wears a practical A-line denim skirt with her daily uniform of red cable knit cardigan, and both have an elongated 1970s silhouette.

POWER DRESSING

THEY SAY: Working Girl, for Proenza Schouler and Céline’s power skirt suits and trousers, Melanie Griffiths blah blah blah.

WE SAY: The working girls of retro Netflix lists, namely Aaron Spelling’s stylish she-sleuths. In Charlie’s Angels’ first season alone, Kate Jackson’s three-piece pantsuits and blouses are the stuff early Gucci hits were made of (and often, they were made by Gucci). In Hart to Hart, Stefanie Powers solves crimes with her dashing hubby (à la Tommy and Tuppence, or Nick and Nora) and has an enviable wardrobe that favours tailored, monochromatic tan trousers and jackets for day (to match her frizzy feathered bouffant). Both, incidentally, were series costume designed by Nolan Miller and Grady Hunt, the hardest-working men in 1980s TV.

THE NEW NEW LOOK

THEY SAY: Hitchcock heroines, by which they always mean Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief and Rear Window, and poor Tippi Hedren in The Birds. In the runway collections from Rochas and Aquilano Rimondi, though at Michael Kors the icy blonds are similarly full-skirted.

WE SAY: For elegant glamour, if you must reference the master of suspense at least make it Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest or Kim Novak and her sumptuous Vertigo swing coat, which are closer to the dishevelled, she’s come undone of Prada and Miu Miu’s collections than the cool, restrained Kelly.

WE SAY: Happy Days reruns, and the nostalgic 1950s co-ed costumes in Trust, an early Hal Hartley film recently released on Blu-ray. Specifically: Adrienne Shelley in her boyfriend’s oversized letterman jacket and a perfect, 1950s striped linen shirtwaist, worn with horn-rimmed spectacles.

PRE-CODE AND PAJAMAS

THEY SAY: Vamps such as Marlene Dietrich (who swans aboard Shanghai Express in her dressing gown) inspired the pyjama robes and liquid slink at Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton, while at Givenchy, models wore their hair in slick, rainbow-coloured curlicues, pincurl rosettes sprayed with hair tint.

WE SAY: Silent but deadly gorgeous Greta Garbo in a fur-trimmed opera cloak over her bias-cut satin gowns in The Mysterious Lady, Carole Lombard in Twentieth Century, and the near-obscene sight of Jean Harlow sashaying with a suggestive slouch across her boudoir in Dinner at Eight. And where the hair’s concerned, Givenchy is quite plainly looking to the tidily spiralling spit curls of a certain Belgian detective’s indomitable assistant Miss Lemon, as portrayed by Pauline Moran in Agatha Christie’s Poirot for the past 20 years.

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